


The flowers still grow

by Aethelar



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Depression, Gen, Healing, Mama and Papa Graves providing emotional support the only way they know how, Sometimes therapy is daffodils and coffee and painting your kitchen and that's ok, loss of limb
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-02-07 07:03:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21453973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aethelar/pseuds/Aethelar
Summary: It's a year after Graves limped out the hospital, a year after Grindelwald and everything he brought with him. Graves is a long way from better but he's also a long way from where he was, so at least he's going in the right direction.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	The flowers still grow

**Author's Note:**

> Minor timeline tweak: Fantastic Beasts happens in December, but I've moved it here to happen in autumn instead. No other reason except to plant the daffodils at the right time.

A year after everything, Graves is in his kitchen, shirt sleeve rolled up and hair flecked with paint as he balances on the worktop to reach the corners of the ceiling.

It’s yellow, the kitchen, yellow walls and a white ceiling, and he’s painting it by hand because it’s important. He’s dripped paint on the counter tops but that’s fine. He’s going to replace those as well, swap out the stately black granite for… wood. He hasn’t decided what kind yet, but he thinks wood. Wooden counters and white cupboard doors.

The kitchen is yellow, and he has a bag of daffodil bulbs waiting to be planted in the window pots. He’s going to paint the entire house eventually, paint over the grand window arches and the imposing bannisters and lay new carpets over the cold and unyielding tiled floors. He’s going to reclaim his life from the shell Grindelwald made of it and he’s going to make himself into a different man. A rougher man, scratched and torn at the edges but still whole enough, a man that lives in a house with a yellow kitchen and daffodils on the windowsill and all his bottles of alcohol poured down the sink and not replaced.

The daffodils are from his mother. She gave them to him when he first came back, when he limped out of hospital and refused the offer of a cane. She planted them for him in a pot he could see from his kitchen window, and she pressed a kiss to his cheek and taught him a charm to hold the onions in place so he could still chop them with only one hand. Graves diligently thanked her and forgot that the daffodils ever existed. He tried the charm once or twice, managed to make himself a decent risotto and a vat of tomato sauce, but he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t hungry.

He wasn’t hungry. He wasn’t tired. He limped through life and squinted at the daylight and tried to think when the sun had come up and if he’d really stayed up all night, and he drank because at least it was something to do. He didn’t think about what had happened. He thought too much about what had happened. He watched dumbly as another owl left another letter and ignored another tentative knock at his door (at Grindelwald’s door while he sat in Grindelwald’s house decorated in Grindelwald’s striking monotones) and told himself that he wasn’t ready to see anyone yet. He’d see them when he was better.

When he was better. Graves was never blind; he knew he wasn’t well. He knew he wasn’t coping, wasn’t dealing, and he knew he wasn’t moving on. It was another point on the list of failures, just like he knew he hadn’t stopped Grindelwald and he hadn’t escaped and he hadn’t fought hard enough to get away. He knew, also, that he was being unreasonable, that expecting himself to just _get over it_ was harsh and unrealistic, that the sympathy people offered him didn’t make him weak and the support people tried to give him didn’t make him selfish. He knew that. He just didn’t deserve it. He was a drunken, self-pitying wreck, an embarrassing caricature of a broken man, and he needed to fix himself. He’d see them when he was better. When he was someone who was worth their sympathy and their support instead of this shameful charade. He just needed time to fix it, that’s all.

He needed time. He had time, in theory, but it slipped away and autumn faded to winter in hazy dawns filtering through closed curtains and stacks of letters that he never read. He didn’t get better. He added it to his list of failures and sometimes he felt like turning to his guilt and snarling at it, asking it what the _fuck_ it expected him to do, what he could ever do to balance it out and make it go away and how he could ever be enough to earn forgiveness for the sins that haunted his faltering steps -

Magic slipped from his grasp. He couldn’t cook without it, couldn’t hold both the chopping board and the knife when he only had one hand to use. It didn’t matter. Maybe it was even for the good, maybe the arm was his punishment, down payment on his debts. The headaches and the hangovers, the choking bile and the wasting stiffness, maybe he deserved it. After all, people lived with one arm all the time, didn't they? It was Graves' own fault that he couldn't cope.

Winter drips into spring and he wears his guilt like a cowl that will devour his soul.

Perhaps it would go on. Perhaps Graves would waste away, worn down a little more each day until there was nothing left to him but piss and vomit, and perhaps he would die in this shell of a house that Grindelwald lived in. Perhaps.

But:

In spring, the daffodils bloom, and Graves sees them from his kitchen window. He is struck by the sudden, devastating thought:

_My mother gave me flowers because she loves me._

It burns in his chest, sticking in his throat and shooting agony through his veins.

_I don’t deserve my mother’s love, but she gave me flowers and the flowers grew because she loves me_

The bottle slips from his hand and shatters at his feet. His vision blurs until all he can see is the yellow of the daffodils and the thought echoes in his head like a single voice against a hurricane:

_My mother loves me._

What can his guilt say to that? It adds to his debt, tells him that if only she knew him like he knows himself she'd turn away. It disdains him for being unworthy of his mother’s love, for taking advantage of her selflessness, for being a burden on her kindness; it reminds him of everything he's done, everything he's _failed_ to do, and how ungrateful is he that his mother loves him but he's still this broken caricature of a man - but the flowers are in bloom. His guilt can do what it likes to Graves, but nothing it says can stop the flowers blooming.

There are good things in the world and Graves’ doesn’t deserve them but the flowers will grow whether he deserves them or not and his mother gave him flowers because she loves him.

He's spent half a year hiding, waiting until he's fixed himself enough to be someone worthy of being loved, but his mother already thinks he is.

It's...

Graves doesn't know what it is. Something small, a flippant observation; something huge that dwarfs everything else in his mind. Something painful, something golden, something that keeps him awake and something that allows him to go to sleep. Something that surfaces when he stumbles past the teetering piles of letters he never answered, that tugs at him when he stands by the door and runs his hands over his freshly shaven chin.

Not today, he decides, and turns his back on the door. The shave is enough. No more today. He waits for the guilt to surface, the cowardice and the derision (it's a _door_, who gets defeated by a door) - but they're still there. The daffodils. He can see them from his kitchen window.

(_Mama, he says when he finally sees her, and he cries, he's a grown man and he was a director and he should be better than this but he cries. It doesn't matter. She still loves him._)

It’s not the same path to healing that he might have taken in another world. It’s not a fast path, it’s not a path that moves only forwards and never backwards, and it’s not an easy path - but it’s a path that he doesn’t have to walk alone. When Graves stands on his kitchen counters and paints his walls yellow, he does it with one hand to prove that he can, and he does it with his mother waving a mug at him and telling him to drink his coffee before it goes cold. When he chooses the wood for the counters his father measures twice and cuts once, when he hangs the wallpaper in his living room his parents loudly disagree about whether it’s straight or not and offer conflicting advice about shifting it to the left or the right.

Somewhere in the world people are fighting and people are dying and Grindelwald still hasn't been stopped. It weighs on him, snapping at his heels when he curls into his sofa, gnawing at his thoughts when he tries to plan a new colour scheme for the hall. People are suffering and Graves is comparing shades of blue.

But:

Graves didn't have friends before Grindelwald, just colleagues that cared too much, and he found their letters in the piles he finally went through. He has coffee with them, not often, but enough; they keep the conversation light and pretend not to see the fragile strain to each other's smiles and it gets easier, as the months go past.

_Tell me when you need me_, Graves makes them promise. _I'll come back when you need me, just say._

Their reactions vary, but he extracts the promise from all of them, and he trusts them to keep it.

People are suffering and Grindelwald is out there and when Graves is needed, he'll go. Until then, he clings to the daffodils and pours his alcohol down the sink and paints over Grindelwald’s house until it is his again. He never feels like he deserves anything he has, but he learns that that’s ok. The flowers will still bloom and his mother will still love him and he’s a broken man that can’t fix himself but that’s ok.

He accidentally drips paint in his coffee and his father heaves a long suffering sigh and winks at him while he puts the pot on for more and his mother scolds him for waving the brush around in the first place and in this world, Graves will be ok.

He’ll be ok.


End file.
